Tag Archives: gnome-keyring

The new feature I myself find most interesting is that the NEO can act as an OpenPGP smartcard. While there is a pretty good introduction in the Yubico blog post YubiKey NEO and OpenPGP I ran into some obstacles getting things running under Ubuntu.

First of all it doesn’t seem like the version of the yubikey-personalization (1.7.0) included in Ubuntu 12.10 recognizes the YubiKey NEO. Without spending to much time on debugging that issue was solved by upgrading to the current yubikey-personalization version, using the Yubico PPA.

Then there was the matter of getting the device permissions right, allowing my non-root user to use/modify the NEO more actively than just having it act as a keyboard (HID), spitting out one time passwords. Turns out that the /lib/udev/rules.d/70-yubikey.rules provided by the current yubikey-personalization (1.11.1) only matches the ATTRS{idProduct} “0010”, which doesn’t apply to the NEO. I solved that by copying the 70-yubikey.rules to /etc/udev/rules.d/, modifying it to instead match ATTRS{idProduct} against “0010|0111″. According to the add udev rules for YubiKey NEO bug report it probably doesn’t hurt to also through the 0110 id into the mix.

Finally I had the fun experience of running into a limitation in the gnome-keyring’s capacity to act as gnupg-agent (Launchpad bug #884856). Any attempt to have GnuPG interact with the NEO smartcard, while using the gnome-keyring gnupg-agent, resulted in a “selecting openpgp failed: unknown command” error. Not finding any cleaner configuration option I resorted to simply removing /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-keyring-gpg.desktop, resulting in gnome-keyring no longer hijacking the GPG_AGENT_INFO environment variable, instead letting the real gnupg-agent do its thing.

Now I only need to decide to what extent to actually use the OpenPGP smartcard feature. Yet, that’s a whole different blog post.

In a default Ubuntu, and probably any other modern Gnome based Linux desktop, the Gnome keyring takes the role of the ssh-agent. If this is not desirable you can tell the keyring not to do that by setting the gconf variable /apps/gnome-keyring/daemon-components/ssh to false.

At the next login you should see your environment variable SSH_AUTH_SOCK pointing towards a more proper socket. Note that the real ssh-agent is still started, assuming Ubuntu, thanks to /etc/X11/Xsession.d/90×11-common_ssh-agent.